


Of The Magus and His Doom

by Twilit



Series: The Gospel Bright and Tenebrous [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, Eldritch Horror AU, F/F, Gen, Other, Supernatural AU - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-01-18 04:51:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1415701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twilit/pseuds/Twilit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux Captor has come to the House of Night and Noon, ostensibly to work under the brilliant Dr. Roxy Lalonde. But the house is home to dark secrets and darker creatures. Rose Lalonde has returned from the Furthest Ring and watches him with interest. Kanaya Maryam is in love with a woman she cannot taste and deals with a hunger she does not understand. And Roxy builds, builds and makes toys of physics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Of

A young man paces in a kitchen not his own. He is alone, though the house has more occupants. He paces in the manner of people in movies, desperately seeking solutions to a problem, evasions of an imminent end. But this is not film, and there are no happy endings here.

The kitchen is dim. The overhead lights, fashionably small halogens, cast light as if through a thick miasma, unseen but still there, still suffocating. The night is dark and impenetrable outside, his poor, maladapted mammalian eyes done no favours by the sickly light. For all its cleanliness, indeed, perhaps because of its near-surgical nature, the kitchen feels like an altar for some obscene ritual. A flash unseen by the outside world erupts behind his eyes, and the young man sees blood, his blood he is sure, sprayed wantonly across stainless steel. He clutches his head in pain and stress and comes close to weeping.

Beyond the fastness of the kitchen door, things lurk. Things that have been befriending him, misleading him, courting him obliquely. In the darkness beyond the door, writhing pseudopodia erupt from immaculate feminine limbs and grasp hungrily. They have whispering orifices and they promise _slave, succour, worship, pleasure, food, food, worship, food._ In the darkness lies a fanged mouth housing a grotesquely long tongue, dripping with soporific poisons. It curls in a motion somewhere between erotic and horrific, a stomach-churning, member hardening twist of flesh.

His head pounds, his heart hammers, his cock throbs and his stomach revolts. No solution, no way out presents itself, and a growing part of him does not want one. There would be a snort of laughter there, but for the terror that grips him.

Even if he found a way out of this existential labyrinth, it would not matter. Such escapes are for main characters, after all.


	2. The

You are worried for your daughter. 

Oh sure, she’s… recovering nicely, although you wonder at the recovering bit. Maybe it’s more… becoming? No, settling. She is settling nicely. Into her old body. Into the body she was born into. Rose Lalonde is settling back into the body you tore her out of. The drama and angst and happy resolution of that all aside, you’re still worried. She’s your baby girl, no matter what she’s become, inside or out.

Her slight frame no longer lurches from room to room, propelled by limbs that seem angered that there are only two of them to handle a job best left to a multitude. She is up before sundown now, and her corpse-pallor is fading, livening up. You swear there was some hint of pink to her cheeks some days. She is gaunt though. The chubby girl, the full-figured young woman, they are gone, wasted away over two years of comatose rest.

The woman who shares your house now does not eat very much, her metabolism warping with the influence of dimensions impossible. She once joked that she gets more sustenance from the adulation and tears of her fans than muffins. Given where she lived for half a lifetime, you kind of believe her, which of course steals any humour from the joke. The way the budding mirth fled from her eyes at your expression pained you, but also gave you hope. 

But no, she does not eat. Drinks though. Not like you, not alcohol. Well, not often. But she sucks down teas and coffees like they are water. It seems no amount of tentacular intervention will spare a writer’s body of the need for _caffeine._

That’s all she does these days. Wakes up, has a bite of toast, a jug of tea and opens her laptop. Then the clicker-clack of words falling from a mind too vast, forced into a vessel too small. When she’s writing her focus is inhuman, implacable. She writes as if her life depends on it, and in some way, it does. After all, there is truth to the joke. She is a horrorterror, of the “Noble Circle” and even in your mind you spit the phrase.

There is a hum of approval in the bright recesses of your mind, where an interdimensional agent-provocateur-turned-diplomat squats. At the term “squats” she (though you don’t know if they even have genders) turns sour. You expect her to pull something petty tonight, a small vengeance for a small slight. The angel in your mind despises horrorterrors even as she approves of your daughter’s work.

You don’t know its title, but you’ve glimpsed its beginning. You caught the words _The Gospel_... once before Rose interposed herself between you and the screen, violet eyes flint hard, gently chiding and teasing all at once. You’re sure the rest of the title is as verbose as people have come to expect from her. 

Because that’s the whole point of this, isn’t it? Capitalize on the fame of Rose Lalonde to sell books telling of horrorterrors, angels and dimensions unknown. Call it fiction, but people will run wild with it all the same and the words, the ideas, the praise will feed lurkers in spaces untouched by creation. So Rose writes to fill the gaping, ravenous maw of her Circle and you are left here to try and work out an avenue for them and angels both to enter the world. 

You, though, have hobbies at least. You go out, sometimes even of your own volition! In two years of conciousness, Rose has had one visitor and has left on but one book tour. And although you will never deny them their fumbling, awkward romance, Kanaya and Rose are… not enough for each other. You’ve seen Kanaya stare at you in naked hunger and you’ve seen Rose dim when the other woman leaves for some trip. Kanaya can take care of herself, but Rose is your responsibility.

She needs friends, hobbies, something _human_ she can engage with. And because you’re her mother and quite frankly botched her upbringing something fierce, you have a burning desire to meddle. So the next time you get back to your campus, you put in for a research assistant, funded partially out of pocket.

If you were to understand anything about how the universe works from Rose’s perspective, you would know that there was pretty much only one person who would answer an RA posting to Rainbow Falls who could hold his own in “esoteric physics, practical engineering, pointless bouts of videogaming, with a better than excellent grasp of programming languages.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only two chapters for now, and short ones at that. I am hella busy, so this is me throwing up what I have done and edited so that I will guilt myself into writing more.
> 
> Also, three cheers for AreYouReady who has graciously offered to edit this work. (pssst lol they might be the titular Magus)


	3. Magus

You know what your mother is doing. To say that you don't care for it is something of an understatement and something to be expected. At the same time, the reek of familiarity, of nostalgia fills your mind. This is almost like the passive-aggressive bouts the pair of you engaged in in your long-past youth. She needs a research assistant like a computer needs a floppy drive, particularly with the parasitical passenger trespassing in her brainspace.

For all that, however, you still at the mention of his name when she gleefully announces that she has found the _perfect fit, lawl_.

Sollux Captor.

It appears that it is a day for nostalgia.

\--

You watch the reedy figure come up the overgrown path leading up to the oversized house you humbly refer to as your home. Scant inches taller than the last time you saw him, Sollux Captor is still a thing of angles and jittery nerves. He doesn't even make it all the way up the path before stopping in a hesitant stutter step. As he visibly reconsiders the wisdom of going through with this, your lip curls in a an uncharitable sneer, covering for a vague sense of relief. But no, he continues up the walk, taking in the vast dimensions of the house and disassembled observatory. A flicker of power, a nudge of carelessness and he skims over the second floor window you watch from.

In a moment you hear the ring of a doorbell and move back to your laptop. Your mother, typically, does not stir from her stupor down the hall, nor does the alien presence in her mind. You wonder what antics Roux put her through last night. A minute or so later, you hear the phones ring, a grating cacophony. The angel comes alight in the unnamable senses of your mind and a second later the phones cease their noise and you hear the dull murmur of your mother.

You go back to writing.

\--

It is your dearest wish that your mother would cease her endless jabbering about Captor, and you honestly have no idea how she can fail to take the point, given that it is being delivered in a flat-eyed, short-tempered stare to a location one inch inside her skull.

\--

You move about the house less, now that there is this strange semi-occupant sharing the space with you. Not out of any sort of shyness or anxiety. No, further entanglements at this point would just distract you. You are having a hard enough time remembering how to write when the past fifteen years (give or take, there’s no accurate graph for extra-dimensional times) of your life was spent in the intrigues of the Noble Circle. You have material, but your mechanism for distributing it is distressingly rusted.

You are not inconvenienced, initially only showing up at breakfast and the like to show appreciation and awkward affection for your mother. You wandered about the house to get used to these mammalian legs once more and to exercise your atrophied form. Your one foray into the world at large proved that you still had some way to go there. Then again, book tours are apparently draining for even the healthiest authors. You are not hiding yourself away up here for any fearful reasons.

The fact of the matter is that more often than not, you cheat. You extend senses and invisible palps and propel this fragile body about on tendrils of force, swinging from ceiling fixtures or hovering on a cushion of darkness. Kanaya chides you for these displays, tells you that you must strengthen your body. But it is just so _tiring_ and _inefficient_ and _pedestrian_.

You are up here in case you slip up and forget to move like a human.

Then one afternoon, you are staring at the screen suspended before you like so many writers previous. A flicker of some power licks at the strings underpinning the world and your head twists around, then down. A portion of your mind breathes out and a cloud of senses billows forth, settling in the basement. Where it nears Roxy, it evaporates in the glare of that which lives within her, but elsewhere it returns information. Useless information. Whatever happened down there has passed, and was but a momentary flicker. Likely a by-product of your mother’s work.

You unfold your legs from the air and step out of your room. You’re not getting anything done, which means that it is time for caffeine. Your tread is so light upon the floorboards, only the creakiest make even a squeak. Down the stairs, into the kitchen, where you consider the discarded coffee pot. Your mother’s lipstick is smeared about the rim and you have to roll your eyes. Cleaned and receptive to the machine’s percolating nectar, you stand before the pot, bored. You want to finish the chapter you have written upstairs, but you cannot be bothered. 

While you ponder the ways to fill your hours (perhaps calling Kanaya?) you lean back against the counter, floating slightly. You kick your legs idly, like a little girl on a swing, except your seat is rigged to the universe by the chains of your mind. The smell of the coffee begins to fill the room and your stomach gurgles piteously. You glare at it, murmuring, “I just fed you this morning, you needy little packet of acid.”

No sooner are those words out of your mouth than, someone else speaks up, “Oh man, Doc, you mind reader, I could really use-”

You drop from your non-existent perch like a sack of proverbial tubers as Sollux enters the room. Your knees buckle, then hold, as the sudden impact and weight challenge their structural rigidity.

“Shit, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you…”

You compose yourself, now confident that he did not see you sitting upon nothing. Face neutral, you turn to address him.

“You did not, though you did surprise me.”

“Oh, uh. That’s good, I guess.”

His lisp is gone, you note. Interesting. Still, it’s been a while in this world since you have interacted. You barely remember anything about him. Vague memories of a table, dice, papers scattered and an abrasive-

“Man, you really committed to the goth look, Lalonde.”

Yes, that.

Pouring yourself a cup of coffee, you let a droplet hit the heating pad, sizzling. Another fills the silence. From the corner of your mind, you feel his anxiety rise, as he realizes his mistake, remembers your condition. You take a sip and speak, your voice a rasping, cracked thing,

“And I see you committed to the ‘nerd thing,’ Mr. Captor.”

Mildly irritated (irritated, not distressed, you tell yourself) by your cracking voice, you leave him to burn his hand on the pot of coffee. He is anxious, clumsy to begin with and you’ve positioned the handle away. There is a certain inevitability to it. Before you ascend the stairs, however, you feel that flicker again. Your mind snaps at it, like a dog after a treat, and it vanishes between the needle fangs of your mental jaws. 

Captor swears as he burns himself on the pot, but not before you identify a touch of prescience about him.

Interesting.

\--

Your daily life, when not writing, is spent drifting about the house like some gothic phantasm, enough to cause delicate young ladies such as yourself to swoon dramatically. These days however, your mother barely starts and you think if Sollux ever saw you like this he would shriek like a little girl. You go out of your way to avoid him for that reason, despite your interest in his timorous mental abilities.

When it comes to your mother, however, you neither try to avoid her nor seek her out. The two of you have settled into what passes for domestic peace, even affection. So when one day you find her in the TV room, playing something far too retro for the massive screen, you touch down into a curl in a massive recliner.

Roxy is frantically hammering away at white controller to control some manner of spaceship, dancing about the screen, dodging enemy fire. The left side of her bottom lip has been sucked into her mouth with tension and her eyes are wide and darting. As much attention as she's giving the game, you register a flicker of eyes in your direction, followed by a "Sup?"

"I will never understand why you are given to the excesses of this generation more than I, Mother."

"Misspent youth, gotta catch up. Also, screw you, R-Type is just as much my generation as yours."

"Oh yes, such a misspent youth. Honours student, multiple degrees, world-wide fame, and then a daughter to boot!"

She freezes, which nearly costs her a life, but Roxy Lalonde's mind does not work like others' anymore and with reflexes augmented by the coursing white lightning of an angel, she wrenches the ship out of the jaws of death and pauses the game. Disappointment wars with regret inside you.

"Rosie-"

"No, I'm sorry Roxy. That was uncalled for. I attempted a jibe and cut too deep."

"...still adjusting?"

While your first instinct is to tell her that it is none of her business, you're not disassociated enough to go through with it. Or perhaps such snappishness is more human? Regardless, you simply nod.

Further discussion is cut short when Roxy's cell goes off. Checking the number, she rolls her eyes and answers it. Whatever she's being told elevates her exasperation and soon enough she's up and pacing. But the conversation is short and she jams the cell in her coat pocket.

"Sorry Rosie, gotta run up to Watertown. Customs bullshit. SOLLUX!" she screams in the general direction of the basement.

When the young man has risen from his coding stupor and the basement besides to present himself nervously in the TV room, Roxy tosses him the controller.

"I have to run to Watertown to sort out some crap about those rotator housings. Take over and try not to game over."

Sollux looks down at the controller he frantically snatched from the air and back up at Roxy, already on her way out the door.

"Seriously? _Seriously?!_ Hey, AM I GETTING PAID FOR THIS?!"

"SAID SO ON THE JOB DESCRIPTION, DIDN'T IT?"

"Holy shit I have the best job ever."

As he clambers onto the couch, opposite where Roxy sat, you venture, "...Job description?"

"Yeah," he answers, scrolling through the options on the pause screen to figure out the controls, "there was this bit about 'pointless bouts of videogaming'. Didn't really..."

You tune him out as bits of the past slot into place in your convoluted mindspace. The why of the present begins to assert itself and a shape of the future hazes in and out of view. The familiar dread-encrusted feel of kourvikoum lingers about your perceptions.

"Oh, Roxy. Roxy, Roxy, Roxy. What have you started?" you murmur.

"Fuck if I know, but I've never played R-Type 3 so this should be fun." You swear inwardly at your slip, even as you return your attention to the screen.

Sollux's control is much more jerky than Roxy's, but no less effective. Where your mother seemed to drift about the level, avoiding and returning fire, Sollux snaps into position, dumps as much firepower into targets as he can and then snaps into a new position just before a dozen bullets end him. After minutes and a boss fight of this, your attention flags and you consider getting up to get tea.

However, as you begin to get up, you feel the most curious thing. Like stuttering tracers, you can feel tendrils of Sollux's mind, his mental focus dart out. You lower yourself slowly and draw yourself in, careful not to disturb whatever is going on. The juddering filaments lash about the TV and console and some blinkingly latch on to the clunky white device. 

Beyond some teenage stupidity, you are entirely unfamiliar with human sorcery. So your curiosity is an implacable force. But as you reach out to examine the mess of his projections, he swears and the cords snap free, reeling back into his head. Remarkably, he flinches at the lashing a wild tendril leaves across his temple as it snakes back into his mind.

You lean forward and steeple your fingers. _Fascinating_. By all rights, that should have been impossible. What you "saw" was merely your pathetic, three-dimensional mind's interpretation of the exertions of Sollux's... whatever. Even if the feedback of his failure to do whatever his mind was attempting caused him failure, it should not have mimicked your viewing so perfectly.

"What are you looking at?" he snarls, bitterly.

Blinking, you force a smile. "A nerd who apparently can't do his job right."

"Oh go fuck yourself. I would have had that, if I didn't just get the most wicked headache."

"Are you quite certain that you do not merely 'suck' at this endeavour?"

"Oh, the bigshot author talks smack. You wanna give this a shot?"

"I think not. My mother assigned this to you, and I wouldn't dream of depriving her of such _skilled_ labour. Besides which, this sci-fi setting is hardly my preference."

"Yeah, I'll bet your were all about the Final Fantasys and JRPGs," Sollux grumbled as he started the level again.

"Hardly. I preferred the physical," A warped portion of your dark mind laughs, a tinkling sound of abyssal bells, "Written works of Lovecraft, Derleth and Lumley."

"Yeah, sure. In her house at Rainbow Falls Lalonde waits dreaming."

Surprised, you find yourself responding, " Iä, mgnafl! Ph'ngluiog nafllw'nafh mguln Lalonde f'fm'latghagl shoggagl wgah'nagl fhtagn."

"What."

"Merely correcting you. I moved past 'death' after all, so ph'nglui itself is an incorrect descriptor-"

"Yeah, wow, don't care."

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry. I shouldn't be distracting your puny mind with such things while you are clearly so over-pressed for thinking capacity. Bottom left, by the way."

"HOSHIT!" 

As Sollux twitches visibly to avoid the incoming fire, you think on the words. Cthuvian is a nonsensical and incomplete language to begin with, but its lunatic construction bears a resemblance to the non-linear conceptualities of the Furthest Ring. Perhaps Lovecraft did touch on things best left to stronger minds. Such as yours, warped as it was by Nrub'yiglith in your youth. You'd puzzled out the language, or what you could then understand of it, by twelve. In any case, your minor adjustment was nearly instinctive.

_Iä, mgnafl! Ph'ngluiog nafllw'nafh mguln Lalonde f'fm'latghagl shoggagl wgah'nagl fhtagn._

_Praise be, but that is not so! Far beyond the threshold, The Lalonde waits at its House Dark and Burning, not waiting, but summoning._

_Iä! Iä!_

\--

When your mother gets back that night, you itch to talk to her about Sollux, but something holds you back. At first you think it's your puerile reluctance not to give her any satisfaction that foisting this person upon you was a good idea. No indeed, you fear you are taking to Sollux for reasons completely contrary to what she envisioned.

She wanted you to have another friend. Instead, with another flicker of kourvikoum, you see... something else.

\--

"How are you finding Sollux? He's not bothering you, is he?"

"Not at all, Mother. We only encounter each other when neither is busy."

"Good. Great! Say, your agent called the other day, asking about a signing sesh-"

"Don't push it."

"Aw, come on! It'll be in New York. You can visit Kanaya and everything!"

"What exactly, in my previous and current dispositions, has indicated to you that I am partial to crushing crowds and the insensate yammering of the public?"

"So take Sollux along! He can keep them at arms length."

"Mother."

"Yeah, ok, fine, his arms'd snap."

"He is like a fetch, all twigs and twine."

"Admit it though. The whelp would be a useful beard amongst the public. Fewer cameras and questions when you all go out together.”

"...Roux?"

"Indeed."

"What do you have to gain from this?"

"Why, but some time alone with dear Roxy. She worries so over you and the boy, there's hardly any energy left at the end of the day to have... fun."

"I rather doubt you and my mother have similar ideas of fun."

"You know that is not true."

\--

You are still thinking on those words a week later. Captor is on the couch, glued to the screen, intent on completing this "project" of actually beating the game. Roxy approves of his extracurricular hours with a wink at him and another at you. You are curled up in a recliner, ostensibly writing, but really there to derive amusement from his suffering. Which is palpable and incandescent. The man can swear.

"TITS ON A FUCKING DINOSAUR, THAT WAS BULLSHIT!" he yells as he visibly restrains himself from throwing his controller through the TV. For the first time since your resurrection, you have a craving for snack food. Popcorn.

"Can it, Lalonde."

"I beg your pardon? I assure you I have said nothing."

"Yeah, but you were laughing on the inside."

Your mouth curls in an approximation of a smile at the familiar turns the conversation is taking. "That may very well be."

"Yeah, well, shut the hell up on the inside," he grumbles as he hits continue. "Not like you could do any better."

"True enough. I lack the hand-eye coordination you have."

"Yeah and this is _with_ my reflexes shot." There's a moment of hesitation, of regret after he speaks those words. Were you not severely out of practice at the psychology of humans, you would attempt some manner of hypothesis for that moment. Alas, you will have to settle for menial inquiry.

"Oh?" 

“I’m in my twenties now, Lalonde. That’s an old man by gaming standards.” Deflection.

“Perhaps by competitive gaming standards, but this is a mere side-scroller.”

“Don’t rub it in.” Avoidance.

“Pattern recognition is a skill that we develop early on and stays with us straight into our inevitable geriatrics.”

A twitch, followed by a deep breath. “Look, Lalonde, if you think you’re helping…”

“My apologies. I’ll refrain from any further commentary.” Retreat.

“ _Thank_ you.”

“Though one last suggestion…? Perhaps just stop thinking about it.” 

As he restarts the level, he gives you this look of disdain over the frames of his glasses. Smudged and speckled by the dust and wear of his work, they are normally fairly effective at concealing his eyes. A pair of mildly heterochromatic eyes. The lack of pigmentation, you’re sure, probably contributes to their inconspicuous nature. Still, very striking now that you can see them.

Then his eyes go back to the screen and yours go back to the laptop. In time, the clicker-clatter, snicker-snap of keys and buttons fills the room in something that is almost companionable chatter. But you have senses he does not and you have been...acclimating to him. You can feel his consciousness roil in frustration, lash himself with words unspoken and unworthy. Tension, power seethes under the surface, but a frenetic, agitated mind keeps it locked away even as it tries to beat the game in front of it.

The decision to do something about it comes to you very much out of the black. You carefully set your laptop aside, not making a noise. Gliding to your feet in the manner of graceful humanoids and not like a wisp detached from gravity, you make your way behind the couch, drawing yourself into the shadows, out of his perceptions. You gather yourself in so tightly you are barely there, a thing on the skein of reality, gerridae lightly resting on the surface of its water. You extend your hands and your powers and place them on his shoulders and in his mind with a command,

_Relax._

He barely has time to start before your spell takes hold, and none to yelp, though he was sure to in a future microseconds from now. Chill fingers rest lightly on his shoulders as icy palps sift and seek through the jittery electrics of Sollux Captor’s brain. You set him on autopilot, a pitifully easy thing to do to a gamer, and go looking for that prescience. 

Battened down underneath a door of thunder you find it. A psychic palp moves to open it and is stunned by the roar of self-recrimination, screaming abuse and failure, failure, worthlessness and failure. You are a vessel of the Dark Imagining, Nobility manifest, a _horrorterror_ and yet you reel from it. _Oh, oh, Sollux._ You’d forgotten the pains mortals put themselves through, the pains you cut and speared Oglogoth with. You intrude now, tread in places you are not welcome.

Not that that ever stopped you.

You form a claw of brazen will and grasp the obstruction in his mentality with the care of one removing a delicate insect. Then you do away with it screaming and thunder and all. It will return in the manner of mortal sins, but that is not your concern at the moment. Beneath roils that sense of prescience and here, in his mind, you identify it. Kourvikoum, made ephemeral, sorcerous. 

“Ahh,” you whisper in wonder. Philosophy turned psychery. _Fascinating_.

But you did this for a reason beyond your own curiosity. You coax it out from the depths of his mind claw crooking and beguiling it forth. You breath out, a breeze of abyssal arcana and the room grows darker still. You set the wavering prescience on the path of the breath-spell and give it a nudge with the tenebrous ocean of your will. As it flickers, shudders out to tackle the problem in front of Sollux.

You muddle the waters of his mind and retreat back to a firmer reality. Sinking back into the recliner, you rest your chin on a fist and watch for his reaction. Getting the full use of his strange sense of kourvikoum, Sollux breezes through the rest of the level and rises from his trance blinking in time for your mother to waltz through the room affixing an earring.

“Aha! I see you’ve gotten further. Good job Sollux!” The timbre of her voice, the stilted vocabulary and the giveaway bloodshot eyes alert you to what is going on here.

“Heh, yeah, wow. Guess I took your advice to heart, Lal-uh, Rose.”

Lips curl in a half-mad, half-cruel smile. “Oh, advice was it, Rose?”

“I simply told him to relax, _Roux_. Nothing more.”

“Oh sure, sure. Well, don’t let me keep you from your… games.” Sollux looks between the two of you and the moment his head is turned towards you, your mother’s, Roux’s eyes glow, leaking pink light through blood vessels

You roll your eyes in a familiar gesture and bottle up the hate, that of a daughter and that of a horrorterror.

She saunters out of the room, her white dress trailing, all aglimmer and probably far too expensive for wherever she is going. Wherever the angel goes to get drunk on worship.

“Roux?” asks Sollux.

“A nickname,” you wave your hand, “for whenever she’s in that… state.”

A blonde head pops back around a corner. “Oh, and don’t forget to ask Sollux about New York.”

“Uh, New York?”

You want to strangle them both. 

\--

Before New York though, other things come to pass, and things fall apart, as they tend to. 

Your mother is a genius, that's clear as day to anyone who spends more than a few hours in her presence (the first few likely to be filled with pointless jabber, no doubt). But there was a reason she had to make a bargain with an eldritch creature to reach the heights of brilliance she works at now. There are places that humanity was not meant to tread, either physically or cognitively. Now Roxy works at trespassing in both. A healthy disregard for boundaries seems to run in the family.

That disregard finally trips over one natural law too many and there's a spear of pain in your head an instant before the house, the very ground shudders in protest. Something has gone terribly wrong in the lab and the physical world cries out. In a blink, you're before the door in the basement, slapping your palm to a scanner. It slides open too slowly for your liking and so your press your withered form through, only to nearly trip over a prone Captor.

He looks up at you, confused and worried, "Uh, what was- holy shit, Rose! Your nose!"

You dab at your upper lip in annoyance. Blood is dribbling forth, mixed with oily black corruption. _Fuck,_ you think.

"Fuck," you say. This frail form can't withstand the use of your power for such reckless teleportation, apparently. The world shakes again, worse, and you shove those thoughts out of your mind. You haul Sollux to his feet with a strength beyond your slim limbs and point up the stairs.

"Get out and keep running."

"What? Why? What's going on here?"

"I haven't the foggiest but it is surely dire if it's coming from in there." You nod at the door at the far end of the lab marked with a yellow hazard sign. _Warning. Unstable spacetimes. Non-dimensionally aware personnel prohibited._

"What? I thought that thing was a joke!"

"It's not. Now go!" You give him a shove through the door and a glare when he hesitates. His eyes dart between you and the otherwise innocuous door at the far end of the lab. Then he mutters something you cannot hear above the low rumble building and stumbles up the stairs.

You're off before you even see his feet disappear, storming through the lab and its sliding, compartmentalized glass rooms. Your handprint is rejected at the hazard door and you snarl, an ugly thing of forbidden, inhuman syllables. Then you bark a command that could loosely be translated as "Open or I will reduce you to your constituent atoms," and the door _melts_ before you.

The room you step into would seem to the average human to be some manner of science station, complete with several screens monitoring whatever it was they were to be monitoring and the discarded refuse of failed experiments. To be sure, there would be a strange, electric sense that there was something wrong, which most people, oblivious to their cosmic inconsequentiality, would brush off. For what Roxy termed a dimensionally-aware individual, however the true, terrifying grandeur of the room would be significantly clearer.

With senses unavailable to Sollux and probably Roxy, you stare into the bubble of other spacetimes and see the thinning of the veil. It is growing, as if to pop like an abscess, unleashing who knows what into this world.

"Mother! Where are you?"

"Rose, don't-"

There is a bare moment of recognition in the weft of energies that the bubble is giving off in which you have time to act. A shield of midnight fog curls about you and the spike of energy aimed at your essence dissipates against it. _This is an attack._

"Roxy!"

"Here," a pained, gravelly voice says, coming from behind a bank of equipment. It's strange, timorous and reverberating somehow. Still, you fold a curtain of protective energies about its location, protecting your mother as you make your way to her.

She is collapsed behind the monitors and keyboards, but doesn't look to be bleeding. "What happened here, Mother?"

"We don't know. We were doing further research on the poss _applications_ ibilities of a ga _way home_ te when the rift _ **pustulent boil on the face of this reality**_ manifested."

Her face twitches in a complicated pattern of muscles and flesh as her mouth contorts to allow two different dialogues to speak simultaneously through it. Vocal chords quaver in discordant harmonies as they try to force two voices through before you see it - one eye bloodshot and bleeding, glowing with a pink mockery of holy light.

"...Mother? Roux?"

"Yes."

"What- nevermind. Are you alright?

"Yep _We will survive_. Though that really fucking hurt. Ni _good_ ce bl _defenses_ ock."

"What's happening here?"

"Some _one_ thing's trying to get through."

"Roux. Someone?"

" _Yes. A distinct entity, not- would you stop fighting me right now woman, she addressed me- one of my people or your filth._ Whatever it is, Rosie, it's an _hungry_ gry and hella powerful."

You extend your senses as best you can through the electric miasma that is building. The power is definitely waxing, and you realize it is becoming visible on the normal spectrum, a nauseating globular rift of colours, trying to form something more solid. Gritting your teeth, you send your thoughts forth into that chaos, that dimensional gurgitation and run into a wall of power and malice. An almost-image of a many-headed serpent rears before you but is gone before you can resolve it. Another spear of malign energy jabs at your core, but you parry it with vitriol and a bank of monitors explode from the discharge.

"This is calculated. There is enough energy and little more to open the rift," you tell the symbiot of your mother and the angel. "The thing behind this was expecting resistance, but not two of us."

A flicker of understanding passes over her face and your mother nods, swallows and shuts one eye. A tear of blood leaks from under the lid, and when it opens, it is glowing. 

"I am an emissary, you realize, Rose Lalonde. Not a warrior."

"You," you say, eyes half lidded, "are a parasite. But right now I just need you to hold the door shut."

A trickle of blood dribbles out of Roxy's nose, bubbling and wavering with the passing of her breath. The pinkish glow of her bloodshot eyes is soon joined by a hazy aura about her head. You ignore the rate at which your mother is now leaking blood, as you are sure to be worse in a moment. The vile volumes of your soul are crammed into this pathetic shell and manipulating any sort of Work wreaks havoc on your mortal flesh. So you let your spirit unwind and your body go lax. 

Your head lolls forward loosely and then back as something forces its way up through your throat, bulging and bubbling with cool, familiar brine. Your slump is thrown backwards into an arch as the corruption of the Furthest Ring erupts from your cavities as your soul manifests its power on this reality. The ichor splatters against your surroundings, sizzling against the aura of your mother and bubbling sickly on other surfaces. Forms skitter briefly in those puddles, like ancient myriapoda born briefly into impossible circumstances.

You feel your senses balloon as your flesh bubbles, blackens and roils. Focusing on the rift, you see the thin sheen of energies the angel has managed to plaster across its opening and the first shattering probes of whatever is trying to get through. A pulse of light from your mother as Roux's aura grows more distinct, coherent and the cracks in the veneer firm up and close. You reach out with invisible palps and begin to Work at the violation of the physical universe.

The rift, this gate is not a phenomenon that can be measured by rational instruments, nor closed by real processes. But you are of a kind with it, a stain on the surface of reality, not rupturing it, yet still defiling it. The methods of physical circumvention are yours as well as one of the Noble Circle and you bend that power to your will now and begin to close the walls of reality. As you do so, your psychic limbs light up in pain and fire and you realise where this encroachment comes from: the spaces between dimensions, where things like you and all other forms would be seared by the Ur-radiation of the multiverse.

Flames lick at the edges of your mind, and you stifle a cry. But you are obviously in distress and in response, the light around Roxy's head solidifies as Roux taps into her power to the fullest. A crown of light bursts from Roxy's skull as a circle of horns, and bright wisps weave a thorny wreath about them. _A halo. An angel is come. Hallelujah,_ you think wryly as Roux pumps power into her barrier. She thinks she is buying you time, and you are distantly appreciative. But you will burn, exposed to the reality of this world and the spaces in between.

So, all the more urgent to shut this gape. Abandoning your attempts at subtlety and deftness, you unravel more of yourself, and your flesh begins to _warp_. Teething tentacles peek out from below your dress and orifices open on your skin. And they begin to speak.

_"This plane is claimed by a covenant of the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors and the Angelic Host. Begone, scavenger, lest you draw the ire of powers greater than you!"_

Your mind is filled with horrible laughter.

_They have told you nothing, Lalonde._

Every word is a brand of fire on your spirit and you feel it consuming you, burning you, eating you whole. In a panic, you marshal your gathered essence and crash it into the rift. You hit Roux's barrier like a runaway train and shove it down the existential throat of the beast on the other side. You register sudden surprise, a rearing of impossible geometries and return,

_"Choke on it, bitch!"_

Your arms raise dramatically from your paralytic arch and with a motion like closing curtains, you slam the walls of reality closed on the gate. The sound is silence in the busy room.

And you collapse, your soul shrivelling back into the safe enclosure of your mortal flesh, taking all corruption, orifices and worse with it. The black retreats into your veins with a shock when you hit the floor and you hear scrabbling, panting and then feel Roxy above you.

"Rose? You alright? Rose?"

Prying your eyes open is a chore almost beyond you, but you manage, cracking the black crust of corrupted tears around your eyelids. Roxy's face is a mess of blood and you're sure yours can't be any better. Relief sculpts itself on her face and you manage a small smile. 

"Do try not to do that again, Mother."

She helps you up, staggeringly, slipping in pools of liquid that it is best not to dwell on and then the pair of you see him. Sollux Captor, the housing of the handprint scanner held under one hand and the other holding two wires together between his fingers. His jaw works loosely.

\--

Your name is Sollux Captor and you think you're going to be sick. You just watched the mutated body of Rose Lalonde close a hole in space and then change back to normal in the blink of an eye. Her mother, your boss, seems to be suffering from stigmata and you are pretty sure those are _corpses_ , discarded like garbage in the Unstable Spacetimes Lab.

You sometimes get these feelings- nah, certainties- that things are going to happen. Usually bad things. So when you _know_ that there is no other outcome to this situation than your death, you're not particularly surprised when Rose raises a hand and kills you with a word.


	4. And

Rose Lalonde

> What is Korvikoum? It is the future. It is the inevitable outcome of a given set of circumstances. It is the process of happening, the path that we are walking on now and the path that we will walk on in the future, based on where our steps fall now.
> 
> The Sight starts with a given future and shows you the myriad paths to it, which choices you must make. But it is very poor at showing the effect of choices outside of your own personal sight. It cannot deal with unknown variables and your Sight requires you to define your own variables.
> 
> Korvikoum starts with you in the now. Every step you take narrows your potential futures. The more you know about the choices you are likely to make, the more likely you are to know the outcome of your circumstances. The more you know, the more you are reasonably sure of, the more accurately you can identify your inevitable outcome.
> 
> Sight works backwards, tells you what your best choice will be and cannot deal with unknown decisions. Korvikoum works forwards, cannot tell you your best choice and becomes more and more accurate the more decisions are made.

Sollux Captor

> Korvikoum? Nah, it's not fortune telling, nothing magical. Actually, you know what? It might be like fortune telling. Those con artists notice all sorts of little things about you that they can use to make themselves sound more legit.
> 
> Korvikoum is predictive logic. The more you know about your surroundings, how people act, how they think, the more accurately you can predict how they're going to act in a situation. Once you get good at working out situations, you can use those sorted situations as actions to figure out the outcome of the next tier of inputs. See, the fortune teller sees a pale mark where your ring used to be, you coming in with your girl friend and you slightly tipsy. She can deduce, with a little instinct, that you've just divorced, separated or broken off an engagement.
> 
> Wait, is it instinct? Because the teller can deduce pretty accurately an emotional state from experience how humans hold themselves, where their eyes go, how they talk. So really, it's just more information. The more you know, the more you can feed into the predictive algorithm running in your head. People who can use korvikoum have that algorithm running constantly, on some level. It never shuts off. The best you can do is try to ignore it. And people wonder why I don't want to socialize.
> 
> What? Fuck no, who the fuck wants to know the future.

La Roux

> Korvikoum and Sight are two different paths leading to a future, the virtually probable and the seemingly inevitable.
> 
> And they are both horribly, horribly flawed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this stage I will be taking a bit of a hiatus as quite frankly I find writing Sollux difficult. Or rather... I find writing a male perspective in a work that is supposed to be overwhelmingly female-driven difficult. Furthermore, the series is getting away from the core of loneliness, loss and body horror that it started in and I need to get back to that if I am going to continue this mess.
> 
> Further work will continue in this series, at least in [Writings in the Spaces Between](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1544345), don't worry.


	5. His

You’re falling, falling down stairs. The old fear again. You’re small, a child, in a stairwell of an old home lit by the sun of a late afternoon. You’re lifted up, held up, teetering, tottering and then your world pitches forward. With heady nausea you watch the first step rush up at you, watch red pain that you can’t feel fill your world, hear the crunch of your nose cracking in its first break. Your loose-limbed body rolls down the stairs like a ragdoll, bereft of control.

Roll, roll, bounce and roll. Your body careens down the thinly-carpeted stairs with no regard for your commands or even the laws of physics. The stairs don’t stop, only shift. Suddenly they’re the cold tiles of an elementary school you can barely remember. Your arm catches loosely on a poorly painted steel baluster and your momentum wrenches you around in a motion that would dislocate an arm, make you sick from the pain. You tumble, head over heels now, down never-ending stairs. You slam into a wall, think maybe its over, but no. You bounce, like a hollow ball, your break on the landing nothing but a sad respite.

Down and down you go, through school stairs, university flights, endless porch steps in the chill of a New York winter. Falling, cracking, crashing, but never dying, never stopping, never suffering. That wasn’t your fate. That was his-

-head, the cracked and bleeding skull of your brother staring dully at you as your plummet abruptly ends.

You wake with a cry, cheeks wet with tears.

* * *

Two women jump in surprise at your scream, breaking off their heated conversation, and it takes a second to process their identities. The first you recognise as your boss, looking much worse for wear. The second takes you longer, mostly because the image of her in your head does not match up with the one in front of you. But then,

“Kanaya Maryam?” you say, surprised enough by her appearance to forget that your life is probably at risk here. 

She gives you a small smile, one that you remember from the goth at your gaming tables. “Hello, Sollux. It’s good to see you again. I had not heard that you were working here now.”

“Yup. Hired him to do the heavy comp sci lifting while I got on with the science experiments.” Roxy’s voice is raw and hoarse, barely recognisable, but enough to bring you back to your senses. You look around in a panic and notice for the first time that you see to be in some sort of clean room. You’re on a stretcher and there’s an IV in your arm. Beside you...

Beside you is the prone body of Rose Lalonde, paler and grayer than ever. She looks asleep, but more importantly, doesn’t look anything like the monstrosity you saw in the basement, the thing you saw kill you with a gesture. Except you’re not dead. You were wrong. Somehow, you manage to be hopeful and afraid simultaneously.

Kanaya sighs and goes back to talking with Roxy, “What does he know?”

“Shit all, I didn’t want him involved in the dimensional shenanigans. He thinks Rose was in a coma, just like the rest of the planet.”

“Ok, just, please do not go and get drunk right now. I will need you sober later, not the least to explain everything else to him.”

“Sooo… we’re not gonna try convince him it was all a hallucination?”

Kanaya looks at you. “Somehow I doubt that will work here.”

“Yeah, nnnooope,” you manage.

“You can’t do your,” Roxy makes wiggling motions at Kanaya with her fingers while baring her teeth, which causes the younger woman to sigh slightly and touch her brow delicately in frustration. Great, Kanaya is probably one of them as well.

“ _No_ , Roxy.” Your old friend stands, arms crossed and waits for your boss to leave. Roxy backs off and half staggers out of the room, causing Kanaya to shout after her, “And get some rest!”

Once the older woman is gone, Kanaya lets out a long sigh and mutters something about “Lalondes” before sitting at the foot of your bed, crossing her legs.

“So I’m sure you have plenty of questions,” in a leading, rehearsed tone that gets a bark of laughter out of you.

“Wow, understatement much?”

A small, indulgent smile that shows no teeth. “I do try.”

“Yeah, well.” Kanaya seems to be waiting for you to talk, her expression kind and patient but otherwise blank. “So, I guess, uh, priorities state that my first question should be, ‘Are you gonna kill me?’”

Regret clouds Kanaya’s face, and for an instant, it terrifies you. She seems to pick up on that, though, and shakes her head. Much more perceptive than she used to be.

“I am sorry that that has to be your first question. I can’t imagine what you went through. But I can tell you that I won’t, and that Roxy certainly has no desire to.”

You voice the unspoken: “And Rose?”

A quirk of her lips. “Who knows what Rose Lalonde thinks these days? Certainly not I, and I am as close as people are allowed to her.”

You swallow, hard. “Greeeaaat.”

“But for what it is worth, I believe that if she has not yet, she does not intend to harm you.”

“For the second time: Greeeaaat.” A breath. “So, next up: What the fuck?!”

It is Kanaya’s turn to bark a laugh, but in her case it is less a bark and more a high giggle.

“A good question. Half the time I hardly know myself. The events of the past-”

“...nya…” You barely hear the quiet groan, but Kanaya is immediately on her feet and leaning over Rose solicitously. “I would ask you to keep it down, but… your voice is ever welcome.”

“Truly, I am shocked and somewhat disappointed that you are not leading with some melodramatic nonsense revolving around dying and having gone to heaven and my so very angelic voice.”

“But I was just about to inquire whether you are hurt as well, to be stuck in this infirmary with me?”

A quirked eyebrow. “Whyever for?”

“Have you not fallen out of heav-”

With preternatural speed Kanaya whips the spare pillow at Rose’s suddenly giggling face, while grinning herself. You’re kind of uncomfortable at the sudden shift in atmosphere. It doesn’t help when Kanaya leans in to press a kiss to Rose’s lips and Rose goes for the full tongue, sickly arms coming up to pull the darker woman in. Before Rose can try to tear Kanaya out of her clothing, however, the furiously blushing taller woman pushes off. As they part, you swear you see _something_ retreat into Rose’s mouth that’s too long, too dark to be a tongue.

“We _do_ have a guest, dear.”

Rose’s face changes from disappointment to carefully controlled neutrality as she follows Kanaya’s gaze.

“Ah yes, the captive Captor who cannot cop to a command.”

You roll your eyes at the alliteration. “Great, we’re at name games already. If we’re going to roll with the torture, can I just skip to confessing that I saw everything so you can hurry up and kill me?”

“Kill you? Oh no, Mr. Captor, I’m not going to kill you.” The feathery soft voice changes suddenly into something more primal, hungry, and she growls in a way that sets butterflies in your stomach. “You have something that I want.”

* * *

“And the fucking corpses?”

“My mother’s experiments to bridge the dimensions. The act of sacrifice, ending a life, weakens the the barrier between worlds if the excess energies of the stilled body are properly directed. Roxy is becoming quite skilled at the ritual.”

The quiet pride in her voice would be horrifying if you hadn’t just heard her explanation of… everything. Rose smiles at Kanaya as she accepts some more tea and you sip at yours numbly. You’re pretty sure it tastes of something, but hell if you can tell what. Numb, remember, fuckstick?

“Worry not, they’re all horrible people. Murderers, rapists, the like.”

“Oh, yeah sure, that makes sacrificing them totally legit.” Actually, you couldn’t give two fucks about them, but it seems like the sort of thing you’re supposed to say in this situation. You’re the straight man, here, right? In more ways than one, you think, looking over at Kanaya.

“And what, Kanaya’s the resident vampire of this fucking supernatural menagerie?” 

The pair trade a quick, surprised glance and you groan, slumping back in the spinny chair you’ve worked in for the past several months. You all moved to your little intern office once Kanaya suggested going somewhere more comfortable. And once Rose dismissed any need for proof by magicking herself some clothing with words that nearly made you hurl and darkened the friggin’ world itself. 

“Can we pretend that I was joking and completely wrong?”

A snort from Rose and a gentle smile from Kanaya. “I would very much prefer that, Sollux.”

“And now that we’re done with that little bit of exposition, I was wondering if I might ask you some questions?”

She doesn’t really look like she’s going to take no for an answer, so you shrug.

“You can see the future sometimes, yes?” You flinch, hard, spilling lukewarm tea on yourself. “When did it start?”

While Kanaya hands you a napkin, you try to put down the teacup with hands suddenly shaking from stress. You manage it, scowling. “Yeah, I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, Lalonde.”

“Please, this is hardly the time to be hiding behind some childhood traum-”

“Childhood trauma? _Childhood_ trauma?” Your voice cracks as you laugh. “Wow, fuck you Rose Lalonde, you’ve got no _fucking_ clue what you’re talking about.”

“I know that you have tremendous natural skill at kourvikoum and that at some point in your past you began suppressing it to the point that it has warped into something legitimately sorcerous and not just a bit of deductive philosophy. I know that whatever episode caused that suppression must have been traumatic because such abilities do not simply manifest, so the strain must have been _tectonic_ and that it is quite probably tearing your mind apart or at the very least, giving you intense migraines.”

“Yeah, good for you, you’ve got some deductive philosophy as well as some magic and probably picked around in my brain too,” you manage bitterly. “Still doesn’t give you the right to go calling my shit childhood trauma and demanding stuff from me, Miss Freaky Alien Tentacle Beast.”

“The right?” Rose’s eyes flash. “While I would very much like to respect your personal privacy and/or return to the virtually idyllic past we shared of videogames, banter and sarcasm, there is something tearing through the very fabric of dimensions coming for my mother and I, and by extension, this fucking world.”

Rose has also put down her teacup and is gripping the arms of the chair she’s sat in. Her muscles quiver and twitch with strain, and something roils under her skin, like worms or a carpet of tiny insects. Veins stand out and darken, going almost nearly totally black as she opens her mouth, venom and spite dripping from every word.

“So I think that in order to protect this world and _you_ , you ridiculous lisping nerdling, I will continue to exercise my right to run roughshod over your precious feelings in the pursuit of tools that will better let me do that.”

You’re quiet a moment, before muttering, “Wow, fuck you.”

And getting up and leaving.

* * *

You’re pretty sure the only thing that stopped her from tearing you another new one figuratively, physically and metaphysically was Kanaya’s restraining arm, but you didn’t care. You get out of there as quick as you could without running and stomped up the stairs out of the basement. Halfway through the dark hallways, a voice makes you jump a good foot in the air.

“Didn’t go so well, eh?” Roxy asks. She’s posed, leaning in a doorway, an empty glass dangling from her grasp.

Trying to slow down your heart while still leaving the house, you mumble, “Yeah, uh, no.”

“But hey, see, we didn’t kill you!” Roxy’s tone is way too chipper for the subject matter, and you don’t even know how to respond to that, so you don’t. The door’s a few paces away and you’re nearly out when she speaks up again.

“Sorry if Rosie’s… even worse of a conversationalist. She gets kinda haughty when she’s had to pump out that kind of power. Think she gets too caught up in the whole ‘Noble’ bit, myself.”

Your hand’s on the door handle as she continues, quieter. “Sorry for getting you caught up in all this. I didn’t think everything’d go to hell this quick.”

“Oh, so it was going to go to hell anyways?” you whirl around and snap at her.

“Well, uh, yeah. We kind of bargained with godlike beings from other planes of existence. Hell, I’m trying to build a bridge thataway.” She gestures up into the sky.

“And what was going to happen with me?”

“You? You’d’ve been done with your contract and merrily working away at whatever with all the mad credentials and connections I’d’ve hooked you up with.”

“Oh man, so generous.” You turn to leave, for real this time.

“Look, it’s late. Let me give you a ride, at least.”

“Just… call me a cab or something. I’ll be on the front step.”

* * *

You know, with that irritating, buzzing certainty, who’s on the other side of the door when the bell rings. You consider leaving them there out of spite, but your mother’s home and you’d rather not A: subject her to this bullshit and more importantly B: get reamed out for letting the doorbell go, so you answer it.

You’re almost pleasantly surprised that it’s Kanaya on the other side. You knew it’d be one of them, and you guess that this is the best possibility. 

“Hello, Sollux. May I come in?”

“One: No. Don’t you think I know how these things work? Hell no I’m not inviting a vampire into my house. Two: Shouldn’t you be in flames out in the sun like that?”

“I suppose you do not, in fact, know how these things work.” A pause. “I’d like to apologize for yesterday.”

You sigh, rolling your eyes. You step out and yell over your shoulder, “Going outside a while mom!” before shutting the door.

“Let’s walk.” The pair of you make your way down the road in this small town hellhole you’ve returned to. You swore you’d never come back but then, oh look! A fantastic career opportunity, too good to pass up. Fuck your life.

“I will not apologize for Rose; that is for her to do. But I am sorry that I didn’t do a better job last night of calming the situation. It should not have gotten to that point, considering the subject matter.”

Her words are as precise as you remember. 

“The subject matter, ha.” It comes out as bitterly as you intended, even though you spent the morning telling yourself that you’d cooled off. 

“Yes. Rose has a tendency to… lash out when things threaten that which she cares about.”

“...you’re not saying she gives a damn about me.”

Kanaya shrugs, a movement so hopelessly artificial you almost facepalm. “I could not say how much. But you have been in many of our correspondences.”

“Oh my god tell me that you two don’t exchange love letters. This is the twenty-first century.”

“Correspondence can refer to e-mail, Sollux.”

“Ok, good.”

“But yes, we do write one another via traditional mail.”

“Goddammit, Maryam.” 

Look at the pair of you, king and queen of deflection and tangents. Now if you could only avoid any more conversation about-

“I would ask that you return to the house if and when you feel like accepting Rose’s apology. She is ready to make one, or will be.” There’s a steely sort of determination in her voice at that, and you wonder, uncharitably, who wears the pants in the relationship, the vampire or the terrible monstrosity beyond space and time.

What the hell is your life even.

“Shouldn’t she be coming to me?”

“Rose is… she is not exactly well. Her body is dealing poorly with the grafting of her transmutated soul. As I understand it, the power she had to channel through it during the earlier crisis did not help matters. I suppose it would not be too difficult to badger her into coming down, but that is something that both Roxy and I would like to avoid.”

“But not Rose.”

“Her regard for her body is somewhat less than the standard human ideal.”

“Heh,” you smirk at that. “Filthy meatsack.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. Computer joke.”

“I see.” 

You’re out onto what passes for one of the main roads around here. There are people out, but it’s the middle of the day, so the streets are pretty bare. Everyone’s either working or working in a real city. 

“Can you, uh, drink, at all?”

“That is a thing I can do, yes.”

“Cool, coffee?”

“I will have something else, but certainly.”

The joys of modern consumer culture ensure at least one Starbucks in Rainbow Falls, and you find it quickly enough. On your way there the walk is fairly quiet, but eventually your curiosity gets the better of you.

“So something’s bothering me. What the hell did Rose mean about ‘a better set of tools’ last night?” 

“Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest. After you left, I spent more time haranguing her about her callous treatment of you and insisting that her intentions, while the best, do not give her the right to speak so.”

“Great.” You open the door to the coffee shop and inhale the sweet scent of burned coffee. You don’t jolt awake, but your stomach rumbles and your mouth suddenly smacks for the wicked elixir. The reaction is purely psychosomatic, but you’re a programmer. You’re not going to deny it. One coffee and way too much sugar later, you continue.

“Yeah, so long as she gets off that high horse, I might be willing to listen. Not every day a geek gets to be part of… whatever this is. Might be,” you reiterate.

“I will do everything in my power to ensure that is the case,” Kanaya responds earnestly. “But I should mention that she may continue wishing to discuss the sensitive matter of the previous night.”

You make a sound of disgust while swallowing your energy delivery solution. “What, does she think this is some kind of superhero origin story crap?”

“Again, I am woefully ignorant in regards to whatever magic she thinks resides in you.”

“Because this didn’t happen because of something, shit happened because of-” you cut yourself off, more uncomfortable than you’d care to admit. “Will this be an X-men thing, the psychic Professor Lalonde teaching me how to use my powers and all that?”

“I certainly hope not. She hasn’t the head for it.”

You blink.

“The baldness.”

It’s only through significant practice _not_ snorting caffeine through your nose that you avoid doing so as Kanaya breaks her statuesque facade to draw her hair back, flat against her skull in severity. Then she releases it and goes back to her tea.

“So that’s not, uh, a problem for you to drink?”

“No, my digestive tract still functions as normal. Nutrition, on the other hand, is another matter. As are cravings.”

“I’m not gonna be a, uh, donor am I?” you stumble. God, Sollux, get it together, you’ve been trying to improve your conversational skills. Typically, you start falling apart in any kind of prolonged social engagement and fall into stutterings and lisps. Now does not seem to be an exception.

“Please, I only accept volunteers.”

“Yeah? Do you get many of those?”

“You would be surprised.”

“Insert innuendo about you and Rose here.”

“Your crude innuendo has been duly noted. Alas, I cannot accept her donations. The aforementioned transmutation has had… effects on her body.”

“Yeah, the freaky grey shit. I noticed. Is that, uh, communicable?”

“Not that I have noticed. And I fuck her brains out regularly.”

The coffee is searingly hot in your sinuses and you collapse into a mess of coughing, sneezing and laughing. You were not expecting that. You were not expecting that at all.

“Oh dear,” Kanaya deadpans. “Perhaps I should have used “insert innuendo about Rose and I here’ instead. You appear to be having a fit.”

Two middle fingers appear above the table. Guess whose.  
Crack-bounce.

Crack-bounce.

Crack-bounce.

The rhythm would be hypnotic if it weren’t already dizzying and sickening. Your world spins down the stairwell, your vision tumbling with your disembodied head as it dribbles its way down the infinite stairs. Crack-bounce it goes, smacking off each step, skipping a few here, but never stopping. Liquid leaks into your eyes, but it isn’t the thick crimson of blood. It’s clear, but sticky. You have a sneaking suspicion it’s brain juice.

Crack-bounce. 

Crack-b-bounce. 

The disruption in the rhythm immediately catches your attention, and you try to focus on the direction it’s coming from.

Crack-b-bounce. 

Bit by bit something edges into your spinning, nauseating view, but you can’t make it out because the world won’t stop, and you can’t focus and its driving you mad and you need to see what’s coming up behind you, it’s behind you, oh god, oh fuck what’s behind you-

Crack-bounce. 

The object comes into view, all at once and you wish it hadn’t. Your brother’s head, all grown up, bouncing down with you. His rotation doesn’t match yours, so for a second its hard to focus, hard to tell it’s him, except who else would it be. 

“Hey Solluckth,” he says, sounding clearer than he ever does these days.

“Hey, Mituna,” you reply, shakily. 

“Th’alrigh’ you know. Nothing to forgivth. You can let it go, yeah?”

“I swear to fucking god, if you break out into song now, I will never forgive you.”

He laughs, a snorting, chuckling sound that would set his shoulders shaking in paroxysms, but they’re not here right now. 

“You wishth-” 

The rest of his words are cut off in a sickening _crunch_ as his head impacts the ground all of a sudden, followed closely by yours, at speed. Half your vision disappears as you feel your skull collapse inward, splattering blood to mingle with the watermelon mess of Mituna’s braincase. Your nose twitches uncontrollably, followed by the flesh around your remaining eye and for a second, you lose focus. 

Then it’s back in all its horrid direction. The half-crushed remains of Mituna’s jaw try to form words as thick red blood burbles up impossibly from a disconnected throat, until he’s blowing stuttering bubbles between juddering lips. His eye rolls wildly, as if he is having a seizure, but worse, more uncontrollably, round and round until it slowly comes to a loose, drooping halt.

He gives one final blink and is still. All is quiet. And then, from the shadows behind his head, from the pool of spreading blood, things unravel. Strange, ribbed cilla, like plant shoots breaking soil, or worms coming up to feed. They grow, undulate and wrap their lengths all about Mituna’s ruined skull, burrowing into the skin to find purchase. The slack expression on his face writhes a moment before the tiny things begin to _lift_ , raising the head from the puddled ground. And from the puddle emerges a dripping, oily maw, gnashing with asymmetric teeth. It is an expression of the abyss, a formless lump of menacing promise, a revolting apparition, hungering for living tissue. There is a wet tearing sound and the skin of Mituna’s head gives way. The skull plummets and the maw snaps shut with a final crunch.

You blink and when the black of your eyelid recedes, you are awake.


	6. Doom

“-n’t be a psychic phenomenon, not like Sight. It should be a mental discipline, no different from an excellent memory.”

“So it’s glorified guesswork.”

Rose makes a face at that. “Would you call Sherlock Holmes’s deductive skills glorified guesswork? Because kourvikoum is much the same.”

“Hell, why can’t you just called it deduction then?” you groan.

“Because deduction is an active skill. Kourvikoum works passively. You observe, and things click into place.”

“Yeah, well, I wish it would actively fucking _stop_ already.”

“That’s what I’m offering. You would have been naturally tremendously gifted with this ability as it is, but the sheer repression of your experiences has warped it, likely exposed it to parts of the human mind more suited to sorcery.”

“Sorcery.”

“Laugh it up, nerd boy. You have seen the evidence.”

You’re quiet for a moment, fighting back the urge to call that into doubt. But you _know_ , in the way she’s been describing this crap, that mouthing off like that would be a poor decision. 

“And that’s why you want to eat that part of my brain,” you say instead.

“Hardly your brain. Your physical organ will go unharmed. If you want to be technical about it, you could say that I’d be eating a part of your soul.” She gives a hungry grin, eyebrows waggling suggestively.

“Oh yeah, much more comforting. Christ.” You shift uncomfortably in your seat in the living room of the Lalonde mansion. It’s dark, the curtains drawn against the dull glare of the sun outside. Rose is seated to your right on the couch, beside Kanaya, who has been silent this entire time. You get the feeling she’s just here to make sure Rose plays nice.

At least she got the stuck up so-and-so to apologize, and believably sincerely too.

“So what do you get out of this?”

“Me? I get an appreciable boost to my Sight. While I do not lack for power. whatever is coming can sufficiently veil itself from me. I am hoping that your… unique abilities will give me an oblique means of circumventing that veil.”

“Uh...huh.” The creeping certainty is back, and now you’re sort of listening to it. “I get the feeling that’s not the greatest idea.”

“Good. That likely means your sorcerous kourvikoum is working as I would like it to.”

“...and you still want to go through with this.”

“I thought that would be clear by now, yes.”

You run your hand over your face and stare at her over your glasses. “What on the hell do you want here, Lalonde?”

“Why, what’s best for you, of course. And humanity. Primarily humanity, though it is clear that this is a burden to you and as such I feel no compunction about relieving you of it.”

“Burden, ha!” She gets an eyeroll for that. _If only you knew_ you intone dramatically in your head. “More importantly, will it hurt?”

“Quite probably, though I will reiterate it will not cause any physical damage. Additionally, I would like to point out that it is possible that it will ‘hurt’ less if you could come to terms with whatever trauma caused it.”

“Yeah, still not a thing that’s any of your business.”

“I understand that, but part of why it will hurt is that you are engaged in a mental struggle, engaged in violent psychic denial. You are caught in a bear trap in your own mind, held in the clutches of razor kelp. Struggling will not help any more.”

“Look, without going into this shit, since it’s _still_ none of your business, I’ll just say that this is my problem, or as you put it, burden. I’ve made my own sort of peace with it after more than a decade of dealing with it.”

Kanaya gives you a strange look at that, and Rose seems to mull it over. “Your own sort of peace… I can respect that. Well, so long as you are resigned to the pain, I have no further warnings.”

“Warnings. Coming from you. Cute. Could have done with clearer warnings earlier.”

“Please. Do not attempt to blame me for your own poor decisions. I told you to get out and you refused. Your involvement with us lies squarely at your own feet.”

“Yeah, like I was just going to leave a-”

“Respected scientist and her clearly capable daughter to deal with a problem in their own home?”

That shuts you up pretty effectively, though your mouth works for a second or two. Muttering, you reply, “Yeah, ok, you got me there.”

Before the moment can descend into more awkwardness, Kanaya stands and brushes at her skirt. “Well, it appears the two of you have sorted the majority of your issues. I will make myself scarce, give you some privacy and possibly see about some tea.”

And she steps out of the room with a sort of affected grace you didn’t notice at all out on the town. Which is when you see Rose smiling lightly and rollingly her eyes, with something approaching affection.

She catches you watching her and you’re surprised that she doesn’t hide the expression. “What a dramatic pair, hmm?”

“I guess,” you mumble, looking away. It strikes you then, and the words tumble out of your mouth without a second thought, “Things of a feather.”

An eyebrow arches. You stutter, stop, lispingly try to drag some sort of defense together.

“I mean, uh, that’s not, uh, oh fuck.”

“While I cannot deny our evidently monstrous nature, _things_ is a touch harsh, wouldn’t you say?”

“Fuck, yeah, sorry, I just… hell, I don’t even know what you _are_.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, I’ve got a frame of reference for Kanaya. Vampires and all that shit, even if half the stuff doesn’t seem to be true. But you? All I saw was, shit,” you slow down. You get vaguely queasy even thinking about it. “Tentacles and black fog and eyes popping out everywhere. The hell was that?”

Rose is quiet for a bit longer before she speaks again, and this time, there’s no fondness, no light touch to the words. Just the rolling, cracking lilt of waves abyssal against a shore. “Iä, mgnafl! Ph'ngluiog nafllw'nafh mguln Lalonde f'fm'latghagl shoggagl wgah'nagl fhtagn.”

You vaguely recognize them as the words that she spoke back when you were slacking off in front of the TV. But only vaguely. Rather than the ridiculous and pompous nonsense that you took them for the first time, this delivery shakes you as the words crash over you, cold and relentless, raising goosebumps all over. The room seems to darken, becoming closer, the shadows creeping higher up the walls. Rose regards you with hooded eyes, the sunken sockets seeming impossibly dark, her irises so dark as to be one with her pupils. They are grown so huge they nearly swallow her sclera. 

“I am a thing from a bygone time, a thing once worshiped by homo sapiens and those that preceded them. We are the Noble Circle, and though our names for ourselves cannot be pronounced by physical throats, we are _horrorterrors._ ” 

When you swallow, it almost hurts, so thick is your spit. 

“Are you afraid again, Sollux Captor? You should know I care not either way. I draw nourishment from the regard of sentient beings, not from their emotions. And we have been starving a very long time, since the Host drove us off.”

She rises without touching the ground, her feet lost beneath her long skirt and as she approaches, the shadows seem to prop her up.

“The, ah, the Host?”

“Things like what inhabits my mother’s mind. They brought the religions of this age, wiped us from your memories. But now your regard fades and they starve too. Now we have made common cause to reignite the fires of worship, but it appears we both will have to defend what’s ours from what is coming.”

“...and what’s that?” You ask, as she very nearly hovers over you. You don’t look down, don’t look at the hem of her skirt, at what could writhe underneath it. Her eyes are bloodshot, but not with any colour you recognise.

Her entire body cants forward on a point somewhere around her diaphragm, and her hands come up to grip your skull. Nails, far longer than your remember, press gently into your scalp and drag forward, eliciting shivers that excite and confuse you. She leans in close and in your ear she whispers, “I don’t know.”

And suddenly everything seems to recede, all at once. The shadows, your fear, the creeping sense that _this will not end well_ , and Rose herself. She tucks her legs underneath her and settles into the couch again.

“I don’t know, and even if I did, I would likely not tell you.”

Trying to shake off your nerves, you protest, “Oh come on, why not?”

“Any number of reasons.” She nods her thanks to Kanaya, who comes back in with a tray of tea, crackers and cheese. You weren’t hungry before, but for some reason, you could use some fuel now. Rose continues,

“Plausible deniability, your proven insistence on interfering and overcomplicating things, the fact that you _might go insane_. The fact that you have not yet cracked is to be applauded.”

“So generous with your compliments, dear,” murmurs Kanaya as she pours.

“Kanaya seems to be taking this in stride. And your mother’s fine.”

“My mother is braced by the cosmic energies of a psychic parasite living in her mind and Kanaya, while you might have a frame of reference, is much more than she seems, even as a vampire.”

“Yeah? Care to show me?”

“What, on the first date? Lewd.”

And with that Kanaya slaps her shoulder as you blink. Now that she’s here, you feel marginally safer and more with it. 

“Not sure I’m willing to hand over a part of my brain to an eldritch abomination who’s hiding all this crap from me.”

Rose’s eyes flash with obvious anger as she takes a sip of tea. “While I applaud your caution, this is hardly the time. I am telling you as much as I believe to be safe.”

“Yeah, that’s-”

“Eeeeeey, guys,” a new voice interjects. “How ‘bout we give him a little more time to decide? Sollux, why don’t you join us for dinner?”

Roxy is either drunk or putting on the appearance of such, you’re not sure.

“You cannot be serious,” Rose deadpans.

“Not having dinner cooked up by folks with corpses in their basement, nope.”

“Oh hell, I won’t be cooking. I was gonna order pizza.”

The look of despair on both Kanaya and Rose’s face makes the whole thing nearly worth it.

* * *

“They always like this?”

“What, equal parts awkward, standoffish and somehow adorable?”

“I’unno about that last part, but yeah.”

“Yes. No exceptions.”

You’ve turned two slices of pizza and some chicken strips into a sandwich, with barbecue sauce to hold it all together. You’re about to attempt to eat it, while Kanaya looks on in something between bemusement and horror. You’re sure this must be getting her haute-couture goat, despite the fact that she went to the exact same goddamn school as you did and were probably there when you invented this thing to spite Eridan. Idly, you wonder whatever happened to that douchebag.

So yeah, it looks like dinner with horrific monsters is something you can do when the monsters order from Pepe’s. Rose and Kanaya pick at the food, whereas Roxy devours it with almost inhuman abandon, while knocking back hard alcohol like it’s water. She’s almost a caricature of a university student. You’d feel like you were being outdone, but you’ve never done well with the booze.

Not that you don’t feel slightly out of place here, but it’s almost cozy. Distantly, and then with a sudden rush of realization, you wish that you fit in better, that you were more… like them. Kanaya and Rose always sort of held themselves apart, even in school, which you put off to being stuck up and pointlessly haughty. But now Kanaya’s distance has grown into a sort of untouchable grace, as if she only stepped lightly in this world. And Rose’s has become the kind of hauteur you could use as a blast shield. Roxy, for all her cool-mom antics and plays at drunkenness, is so unbelievably hard-working in the lab you are literally light-years behind, and apparently she’s host to some weird-ass alien shit too.

It’s hard being the human in this kind of company.

Which is why you have no idea why the misfiring hunk of erratic machinery you laughably refer to as your brain decides to ask, “So, what if I learned to, uh, use this shit?”

The sets of very different eyes regard you, one dark and questioning, another cool and calculating and a third bloodshot and bleary.

“I mean, instead of letting you root through my brain like a grandma at a yard sale.”

“I was under the impression you regarded this gift with a hostility tantamount to self-loathing?”

“Yeah, well, I’ve never had any real perspective on it,” you say, gesturing to the group, running your mouth and hoping your brain can keep up. “What if I wanna do this my own way?”

“Pray tell, how would that work.”

Rose’s face is impassive, but you think there’s a bit of real curiosity in there. You can’t be sure, but it’s enough to push your luck. “I mean, you’re always going on about how you’ve got these abilities and skills, so why couldn’t you teach them?”

She actually looks like she’s considering the question. “Sollux, when I learned these “abilities” as you call them, I was the captive of the Noble Circle for _thirty years_. My very _soul_ was warped to make it pliable, amenable to the kind of control and channelling necessary to accomplish what I do so easily. 

“Thirty _years_. Thirty years of crysalis, of transfiguration. Thirty years of having things done to me, taught to me, put _inside_ me.”

Something cold and slimily wet snakes up your pant leg like a viper, straight up to your crotch. You flinch so hard, the pizza sandwich falls apart in two directions, splattering the table in dark red. For not even the briefest of moments, you feel that questing member touch your taint, then the sensation is gone. But your arousal isn’t, and Rose knows. Your eyes flick from an oblivious Roxy to a concerned Kanaya, worried for your own self-image.

“You may be a prodigy, Sollux, but you are not going to beat that time. You haven’t the focus, the dissociation from the physical. And even if you did, are you so sure that your mind, your soul would survive it?

“We do not have the time.”

With the creeping certainty and pulsing ache of the universe telling you so, you know she’s right.

“Do the right thing, Sollux. Unburden yourself.”

* * *

Her words are still hanging over you when you finally go to bed. You stare into the dark above you, as if you could pick them apart in the night, make them less relevant. But all the dark does is make you feel so very alone. It’s not much different from being a kid, and afraid of the dark. Shit, it’s not like you don’t have coping mechanisms of your own.

So you reach for your phone, unplug it from the charger and watch its blue light cast away the dark, and bring the shadows. And you call your brother.

It’s on the eighth ring that it picks up.

“If the first thing you say is ‘did I wake you up,’ Mituna’s going to kill you,” your brother’s girlfriend says. “Hell, _I’m_ going to kill you.”

“Yeah nice talking to you Latula. What, the phone fall between the couch cushions again and both of you were too lazy to reach for it?”

“Get fucked!” Latula responds cheerfully on the other side of the line. “Wanna talk to him?”

“No, I’m calling in the middle of the night because I want another heartburn-inducing tale of whatever latest suicidal stunt you’ve taken my brother on.”

“Well if you insist…”

“Get fucked,” you growl, less cheerfully. It flows off her like water, though, and she cackles into the line.

“Yeah, sure, one sec.”

A moment, then your brother’s tremulous voice comes through. “Thup, brah?”

“One: don’t ever say that again, two: no, really, don’t ever fucking say that again.”

The harsh, gasping laughter that characterizes genuine mirth from your brother fills your ear and for a moment, your spirits are actually lifted.

“Shthure thing, brah.”

“I am forcibly separating you and Latula and her skater-head friends, I swear to god.”

“And I’ll forshthibly stheparate your head from your shthhoulders, brah” and just like that the smile disappears from your face as images from your dreams flash before you in the dark.

A swallow.

“...you thtill there, man?”

“Yeah, sorry. Listen, this was stupid, I won’t interrupt your night in or whatev-”

“Yeah, uh, uh, no,” your brother stutters, agitated. “You’re not getting aw, away witthhh that. Now I KNOW thomething’s up.”

His voice goes high with the increase in volume and you reflexively move your phone just enough from your ear to compensate.

“Alright, geez,” you say, gathering your thoughts. “So I met this girl and she said something…”

“Thtop, whoa, wait wait. You. _You_ met a girl.”

You want to bang your head off the backboard.

“Yes, now,”

“Sthollux, I am not doing the birdsth and the beesth with you right now.”

“Oh my fuck.”

“I mean Latula is right here and it would be stho very awk-”

“OH MY FUCK, NO I’M NOT INTERESTED IN HER!”

“Liar. You’re interesthted in justht about every girl thhhaat crosses your path, you’re that desthperate.”

“Cool, hanging up now,” you say, and thumb the phone off. You wouldn’t call the look you give your ceiling petulant, but that’s just you. The seconds pass by and you begin to think maybe you _are_ being petulant when the phone buzzes.

“Okaaaaay, sthorry, jeezth. Stho you met this girl, and…”

“Yeah fuck you too.”

“Oh come on, don’t be, be like thaaat.”

“You’re clearly not invested in this confiding business, I don’t know why I bother.”

A long-suffering sight on the other side. “Sthooorrrryy. I’m sthorry, I won’t bully my little brah anymore.”

Your eye ticks, once.

“Stho. Continuuue?”

You take a moment and swallow. “Yeah, uh, ok. So basically what she was getting around to was making a pretty good case for, um, well, getting… help? Kinda?”

“Help? With what?”

“Uh,” you stammer, trying to put the past several days into a sane context. “Well, you know those nightmares I get?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, them, and uh, what she so charmingly calls ‘childhood trauma.’”

“ _Huh_.”

“Yeah, I know, right? Basically, she’s saying its time to, well, uh, ‘unburden’ myself.” You make air quotes he can’t see.

“Alright, Sthollux, I want you to listhen real closthe.”

You swallow. “Yeah?”

“You find thisth girl for me, yeah?”

“Yeah?”

“And then you _fucking THANK HER_ fffor me!”

“Eh?”

“And tttthen posthibly wife her, I don’t know.”

“What? But,”

“Sthollux. Dude. I have been telling you for YEARTHS to friggiging forgive yoursthelf. The fact that thisth woman isth getting you to listhen meansth shthe getsth my approval, no questhions asked.”

“Even if she’s a betentacled horror from beyond the outer edges of space and time.”

“You sthay that like we both don’t know what kind of hentai you like to wa-watch.”

You hear a high-pitched giggle off in the distance, followed by the quiet question, “Oh-ho! And what kind is that?”

“Oh man, I gotta pull sthome up, it’sth-”

“MITUNA!”

“Ha ha, justht kidding.” Then, in a hoarse stage whisper, presumably to Latula, “Laaaater.”

“I hate you so much.”

A dismissive noise from the other end. Then, “No, but stheriosthly…”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna listhen?”

“I… guess? I mean, it’s been hanging over my head for a while.” _Or_ in _my head, apparently._

“Good. Now, if there’sth nothing elsthe, there’sth hentai that needsth wa-watching.”

“So. Much.”

But it’s with a smile that you thumb the phone off.

* * *

“Upon further consideration, I can, with almost utmost confidence, state that this will hurt.”

“Fucking wonderful. So you’ll be so very glad to hear that I tried that coming to terms bit you’ve been pushing on me.”

“Oh? May I ask how that went?”

“Well, I’m here, I’m able and I’m mostly willing, so I guess we’ll see.” You wince as the growing pressure in your head makes itself known again, this time with the swelling feeling that this isn’t a great idea. “Though that kourvikoum crap is telling me this is a bad idea.”

“You are about to deprive yourself of a fantastic defensive power, I should hope that it would be obvious to you that this would be a personally problematic decision.”

“Yeah, well…”

Rose wait for your a moment, then asks, “Cold feet?”

There’s a cold glimmer in her eyes, a challenge for you to defy her again. Your indecision swings to defiance for a contrary moment before you fight it back down with a shake of your head. Your feelings must be written on your face, because Rose’s eyes narrow and her lips twitch for a moment. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that she’s hoping you rebel at the last minute. Not for the first time you feel like prey before a predator.

Or predators. Rose is sat on the couch, flanked on either side by a standing Kanaya and Roxy, both of whom are doing their best to look non-threatening and accommodating. You’re drinking the tea Kanaya made you to calm your nerves. Yeah, like that ever works. Roxy just smiles in a motherly way and you get the feeling she’s about as sure of what happens next as you are.

And so you put that into words. “What’s next then?”

“Next, you seat yourself here.” Rose slides over, making room for you. You manage not to trip over your own two feet in the short distance there and sit heavily on the couch. “And now I will begin the extraction. If necessary, Kanaya will restrain you. My mother is on hand for any medical necessities.”

You wait for her to put her fingers to your head, or something similar, but all that happens is the room darkening. You want to say that it’s something you’re used to by now, but the already dim light being sucked from the world just messes with your animal hindbrain. There’s danger in the dark, even if it’s sitting demurely in front of you.

Like the spots that float in your vision, blossoms of dark bloom from nowhere, and from them writhe palps, suckers and formless mouths. The grasping appendages make for you, while the maws leak indescribably iridescent oil. Then they seem to take a breath in and vicious, white hot pain nearly knocks you out.

Your scream is a strangled thing as you convulse and clench up, hands going to your skull. Firm hands press down on your shoulders to hold you in place and you don’t even have the strength to fight them. Suddenly, your head feels like there isn’t enough room in it for your brain, and your skull feels like its cracking from the pressure. 

In between your whimpering and mewling, you can hear a soft voice murmur, _It will be alright, just hold on, hold on._

For a moment, you mistake its warmth and comfort for Kanaya’s, but it isn’t. The voice isn’t coming from behind you, it’s in your mind. It is Rose Lalonde, and you can feel her mental embrace as she moves a tiny portion her vast psychic presence into your mind. 

The pain doubles, triples, and your mind feels like a supernova igniting, but there! Now a touch in your mind, a cool oasis suddenly comes into being. _Believe in me, Sollux Captor_.

You retreat to that tiny mental sanctuary and arms like the fronds of undersea vegetation welcome you. In reality, you are trembling, sobbing and shrieking, and you are distantly aware of it. But here, you feel only the desperate attachment of a man seeking asylum, willing to get into bed with anyone. Anything. You do not try to comprehend what enfolds you within your own mind, but it is enormous, many-mouthed and speaking. _Believe, poor psychic. In another time, you could have done great things, been something great. But now, your resources are needed elsewhere. I have need of them._

And you feel something being teased from you, from the fires that surround you, and from deep within your mind. _Oh yes,_ Rose purrs. _Oh, yesss. Such a beautiful tortured mind you have, Sollux. The things I would love to do to it, to you._

In reality, a shock of cool pinpricks on your face, at your temples. Now Rose runs her nails, strangely pointed, down the sides of your face, along your jaw. You shiver, and for a moment, think of things other than the searing pain.

“Now, give me what I want.”  
 _Now, give me what I want._

And like that the fronds turn to fangs, the embrace to tearing jaws and you scream, once, before darkness.

* * *

You don’t want to open your eyes, because you know what you’ll see.

A tiny form, you, sat helplessly at the top of the stairs.

At the bottom, a twitching, spasming boy, with a spreading pool of blood haloing the head.

Your high-pitched voice fills the air with crying.

But your dreams do not give you any choice, and your eyes crack open like the first glimpse of a gloomy day.

You are sat at the top of the stairs, but all is silent.

And at the bottom, no boy, no body, just the halo of blood.

* * *

When you come to, it’s by bolting upright on the couch. Your vision is scattered, doubling, then focusing again. You find Rose splayed across your lower half and hands are still holding on to your shoulders. In a panic, you shrug them off violently and spin around, tearing your legs out from under Rose. She slips off the sofa as you scramble away from your restrainer.

“Sollux? What is it, are you alright?” Kanaya asks, leaning in. “Oh no, your nose is bleeding…”

She reaches for a napkin, but you see her tongue dart out and lick at her lips and that’s it. You snap. You need out of there, and you need out of there fast. Vaulting the couch, you bolt for the door, and careen through it, heedless of people yelling your name. You shoulder through the door opposite and slam it behind you, back pressed against it as your chest heaves and your vision dances. 

The kitchen is darkened, and you fumble for the light switch as you try to get your breathing under control. You find it and flip it on for all the good it does. The halogens are strangely dim, were they always this dark? You’d snort in derision at yourself, but you’re still too manic. You know the answer and all it does is make you want to _run_ from the things out there. Blood-sucking, mind-eating things that-

You wince as a twinge of a headache comes on and you can almost see a scene of your blood splashed across all the stainless steel. Then your nose begins to drip with it and a giggle escapes with the red liquid. Stumbling over to the sink, you run warm water and try to wash your face before grabbing some paper-towel. You lean your head back and jam the paper towel back against your nose. No reason to leave a bloody trail.

Suddenly, knocking. You’re nearly a foot in the air before you get yourself even vaguely under control. 

“Sollux?” comes Roxy’s voice, setting you both more and less on edge. 

“What.”

“Kanaya said you were bleeding from your nose.”

“Yep. I got it. Head back, tissue up against it. I’m fine. No need for help here, nope.”

“Uh-huh. And are sure this has nothing to do with-” Roxy cuts herself short as the lights flicker. No, that’s not right. As the darkness flares, spikes for a moment. And then the thick is air cut by atonal, inhuman screaming.

Your hands go up to your ears as the sound seems to come from everywhere at once, from every cranny, from every dark corner. It is unintelligible, panicked and fearful. For a spiteful second, it’s nice not to be the one terrified. Then the reality of the situation kicks back in and you have to wonder at what could make a thing from beyond this reality so affected.

Roxy is obviously not at the door when you peek around it, hands still blocking your ears from the incessant screaming. Though every instinct screams at you to run, you find yourself returning to the living room, through the door you just ran through. With your skin crawling, you slip through the door into the dark. Your hands fall from your ears as you take in the horror writhing in front of you. Kanaya has been thrown back, through the entertainment, taking out the coffee table and overturning a chair. What threw her back…

Rose twitches and spasms in mid-air, held aloft by a tumorous growth, erupting from beneath her skirt and through her mouth. Attached to the floor and ceiling, It glows with a sickly unlight and things like eyeballs loll wildly in its mass. Its slick black skin oozes corruption from miniscule frills that quiver with terrified energy. And from the darkness, from the shadows, it screams, almost discernible.

“ _ **-AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIECOMESHEWILLEATYOUALLAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-**_ ”

When it manages words, it sounds like Rose, but hollow, reverberating, as if shrieked from the back of a cave. You take a step, neither forward or back, and the movement is enough to focus every eyeball in the mass on you.

_**”TAKEITBACKTAKEITBACKIDON’TWANTTOHEARTHEMSOLLUXTAKEITBACKICAN’TLISTENANYMOREIDON’TWANTTOHEARTHEMBEKILLEDBYCALIBORN-”** _

Kanaya is scrambling to her feet, shaking her head to clear it. She sees the mass and her eyes go wide. Then she sees you and faster than a blink crosses the room, grabs you and tries to get you to leave. You hold your ground.

“Jesus, what’s going on, what happened?” You yell.

“I have no-” Kanaya winces as the shrieking and pleading climb to even more painful levels. “No idea, but it is likely no longer safe for you here. You need to get out.”

It’s then that you notice that Roxy has only just entered the room. Her white lab coat is stained with the blood that is dripping from her every facial orifice, and she is holding some kind of haphazard contraption. With mounting worry, you notice it has a trigger, but you are too late to stop her as she pulls it.

A wave of white energy cascades forth and sears into the vomited-forth mass, blistering and cauterizing it, cutting through where it is attached to the ceiling, popping tumours like oily bubbles. A horrific, full-body tremor wracks Rose before more tendrils erupt from her mouth and nose with a spurt of ichor and slime. The gun is smacked from Roxy’s grasp and she winces in pain, holding her gloved hands. Then she strips them off and when she opens her eyes, they glow bloodshot pink. 

It’s another inhuman spectacle to add the horrors you’ve already seen tonight, but it doesn’t prepare you for the crackling cry that bursts from her throat with a spittle of blood.

“ _Oh, get your act together, you mewling child! This is as befitting a member of the Noble Circle as a tantrum does a grown woman!_ ” 

The voice crackles like static, popping blood bubbles from ruby-red lips. Arcs of white energy, so like the discharge from the gun, jump from Roxy’s eyes, down her arm, only to be blasted like a slap across Rose’s face. The smell of ozone and rot fills the room and the shrieking almost stops, before,

“ _ **-DONOTUNDERSTANDROUXICANNOTHOLDICANNOTWINAGAINSTTHISTHISTHINGITISTOOMUCHANDIAMTOOSMA-**_ ”

Another crack of energy across Rose’s face and her eyes blink, actually clearing themselves of viscera and black filth.

“ _Fool! You were small when you treated with denizens of the Furthest Ring, and still you prevailed. You are limitless, Rose Lalonde, and the only thing rearing before you is fear. Are you going to cower before a concept? OR ARE YOU ONE?_ ”

“ _ **-icannotwinwithoutthecircleandiwillneversummonthemintimeicannotwinalone...**_ ” The shrieking changes tone, dies down. Primal terror has given way to despair, to the inconceivable hopelessness of a being of pure thought. It wrenches at your heart and sets fear itself in your mind at that impossibility.

“ _Does it look like you are alone?!_ ” When Roxy point at you, you flinch, expecting to be hit with one of those arcs of energy, but nothing comes. Rose’s own violet eyes flick to you, then to Kanaya where they linger as the dozens of twitching eyeballs flit their gazes between persons. Then, with a sound like flesh being rent apart, the tumorous pillar detaches and begins to recede, into Rose’s face and back up into her.

Roxy heaves a sigh and closes her eyes, staggering to the side. She catches herself on the wall with one hand, and with the other drags a sleeves across her mouth and nose. A disgusting sucking noise later, and she’s snorted a bloody mess back up into her cranial cavities. Of everything you’ve witnessed tonight, that’s enough to make you hurl. Then she opens her eyes and they’re still blood-shot, but unlit. 

As Rose lowers to the ground, Kanaya steps forward slightly to take her up in her arms and Roxy checks her temperature, and pulse.

“Take her to the infirmary,” she murmurs to Kanaya, sounding so very tired. She turns her gaze towards you with a wan smile. “Guess it wasn’t just gonna hurt you, eh?”

“Uh,” you manage, intelligently. “Sorry?”

Roxy waves it off. “Nah, don’t worry. No one saw this coming, not even Rosie. Hey, do you need, like, a drive home or…?”

You blink at the sudden change of topic and manage to take the hint. “No, no, I’ll call a cab. Can always charge you or the school.”

“Heh, thattaboy. I’ll, uh, make sure one of us calls your or something, yeah?”

“Sure. Uh, mind if I…?” You point at the mess around your mouth and nose, and Roxy blinks, touches her face before giving a short, high laugh.

“Oh yeah, clean up. Don’t need to be scarin’ cabbies any more than we already do.”

* * *

In the cab, you half-doze through misty night. The pane of glass is cool against your head, exacerbated by the sweat in your hair. You are still struggling to take everything in that’s happened tonight, hell, over the past several days. Your mind is erecting the kind of blockade you’re used to going up against when you’ve just powered through several hundred thousand lines of code, the kind of mental block that basically means you need to just give up and go to sleep.

And that’s when your phone rings.

A slow, groggy glance at it shows your brother’s number and you want to bang your head off the window pane. You already know it’s going to be Latula, and you are pretty sure she’s gonna rag you about whatever she and Mituna got up to watching last night.

You flip the phone onto its face on your lap, shutting it up. 

It starts to ring again. 

You squeeze your eyes shut in frustration. Ugh. You don’t want to do this, but best to get it over with. You can sleep when you’re home. Time to face the music.

Time to face the music.

“What is it, Lat-”

“Sollux?!” she cries. “Oh god, oh god, it’s Mituna.”

The tears in her voice have you sitting upright, even as your blood runs cold. 

“What is it? _What happened to Mituna?_ ”

“He- oh god, Sollux, he’s _gone_ , I-”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN GONE?”

“He just… he _melted_ Sollux, dissolved into this, this goo, I’m covered in it, oh god, Sollux, what’s _happening?_ ”


	7. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Can you see it yet?
> 
> See the inevitable end?
> 
> See how this world ends in darkness?
> 
> Is your kourvikoum strong enough to see the inevitable outcome of these given actions?

Blood. 

Sweet, sweet blood. It fills your mouth like the nectar of gods, pleasure denied you for ages. It fills you with a warmth that sends tingles from your mouth to your nethers and you moan almost as loudly as your victim. It is almost torture to stop yourself from gnawing the meat, gouging the wound open further to let the hot mess pour into your mouth, down your neck and breast. But no. No. No! You had a reason for this and it wasn't fulfilling your selfish desires. Still, you suck, swallow, and lick. Your needs meet your desire, and this one must be incapacitated further. Your temperature rises and you force out a hot gust of breath, drawing a weak, feathery moan from the one underneath you.

You begin to slide your fangs out of pliant flesh, luxuriating in the feel of skin scraping under them, but a soft touch at the back of your head pushes you gently back into the neck of your victim. You hardly need further encouragement, and you feast further on your first warm blood in ages. The hand traces light patterns through your hair, and you shut your eyes and whimper in pleasure. But soon life begins to pass from the body and you have to withdraw.

You do so reluctantly but carefully, slipping your fangs free before retracting them fully and lapping the wound shut. A groan lifts from your victim, agonized in the way only someone close to orgasm can be. 

“Hush,” you say. 

“Sleep,” you command and push off them, languidly. As you surface from your feeding ardour, you note the hand still in your hair, and follow its pale length to white silken robe, and then further towards a lightly lined face, and glowing, bloodshot eyes.

“Roux,” you murmur at the woman perched on the armrest beside you, unconsciously leaning into her scritching fingers.

“Yes?”

“I was…” you blink, and shake your head, clearing it of its haze and losing her hand. “What do you think you are doing?”

“Why, I thought I was offering comfort. You looked like you’d had an even harder time. Oh! Was that not comforting? My apologies.”

Your eyes narrow at the creature living in Roxy’s mind. Rose calls it a parasite, and does not trust it, and though it seems entirely sincere, you find that you do not either.

“I see. Please do not do that again.”

“Very well. Again, I apologize. My efforts in learning human interactions need further pursuit. But then,” she says, nodding at the body, “You are hardly human any longer. Would you like to tell me what happened?”

You shift uneasily, gathering your thoughts. “I think we may have made a mistake.”

Roux cocks her head. “A mistake? I agree that Rose’s fit was indicative of a power far greater and of a different nature than she had anticipated, but-”

“Wait. What do you mean, a different nature?”

“Hmm? Rose was screaming about hearing voices, the voices of the dead. That is no manifestation, and certainly not of kourvikoum. As far as I know, it is impossible for that discipline to be psychic, but I bowed to the wisdom of the Noble Circle.”

The sneer in her voice very nearly manages to keep itself off Roxy’s face, but it leaks through regardless, marring the elegant lines.

“What did Rose… extract then?’

“Some manner of clairaudience ability, and an absolutely frightful quantity of psychic power, if that horrific display was anything to judge by.”

“Clairaudience. The ability to speak with the dead.”

“Quite.”

“That… explains some things,” you say, glancing at the resting body, with tension mounting along your shoulders.

“Oh?”

“When Sollux barged in earlier, he was screaming, demanding that Rose ‘give him back.’”

“Ah, a loved one that Sollux could hear. Tragic.”

“I think it was more than that. From what I could ascertain, Sollux said he had been a real, physical person. His girlfriend apparently reported him disappearing.”

“Fascinating. Perhaps all that psychic power focused solely on one being allowed his brother some semblance of life.”

“Oh god, that trauma that Rose talked about- that was when- Sollux has been- oh god, the poor thing.”

“Mmm. Tragic. You said he ‘barged’ in.”

“Yes. Started yelling, demanding to see Rose, demanding answers. He tried to push past me and when I suggested he calm down, he tried to punch me. When I restrained him, he… well, he tried to bite me.”

The parasite’s smile curled, catlike. “Eye for an eye. Liable to continue to hound us?”

“Roux, he has just lost his brother, or at least thinks he has. He’s not going to just forget about this, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, not forget. That would be too conspicuous. Besides, his brother’s girlfriend is involved. Best to… guilt him, perhaps.”

“What?”

“Influence him into believing… hmm, that he got the call from this girl, _before_ he underwent the extraction.”

“Then why would he come in-”

“He didn’t. He got mad, scared, swore off this whole business and has been in a malaise since.”

“He will never buy into this, seeing Rose like that alone would imp-”

“See a horrorterror manifest is an event far too easy for the human mind to dismiss, or rather, repress. Pass it off as a nightmare if you must.”

“But-”

“Kanaya.” Roux’s voices crackles sharply. “You heard Rose. She is despairing. Right now we cannot afford another disruption, particularly with what her maddened ravings spoke of on the horizons. Do the deed.”

You hold her gaze, defiant, but you have the dawning sense that she is right. The hopelessness you all were subject to last night was oppressive, until Roux seized her attention. As frail as she has been these past years, Rose has never been what you would call desperate.

So you work your cheeks, secrete more saliva and roll your tongue. You turn his head away and extend your lengthened glossal muscle, contracting it into a sharpened funnel. A quick darting jab and you inject the mind-affecting secretion into his bloodstream directly, the needle-tip of your tongue bathing in the delicious river of his life. But focus, you must focus.

“Sollux, listen to me.”

* * *

The door shuts as the cab drives off and the world is suddenly closer, darker than before. You and Roux return to the living room, and this time she takes a seat on the couch next to you. You’d pay more attention to all the exposed flesh if you weren’t well sated and sleepy. But you do not want the dreams to come, most of all because…

“Roux.”

“Yes, dear?”

“What is coming?”

Her silence is telling for a creature as voluble as her. You watch her through heavy-lidded eyes, watch her bite into pale, flaking lips. A moment, then,

“Millenia ago, your people called it Caliborn.”

“What is it?”

“A world eater. A cosmic predator. A demon from the beginning of time.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RL will return.  
The Dolorosa will return.  
So will my master.  
And I am already here!  
Haa haa. Hee hee. Hoo hoo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so ends the fourth part of this story, another pulsating brick in this life-consuming edifice that I am walling myself behind.
> 
> Updates will be sparse, if existent at all, until December as I get a handle on IRL things. 
> 
> Still, expect some thing in Writing in the Spaces Between, and maybe all my other crap that's unfinished.


End file.
